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Mountain News: Vail seeking Puerto Rican bus drivers

VAIL, Colo. – For well more than a decade, Vail town officials have filled the ranks of bus drivers with recruits from Australia.

VAIL, Colo. – For well more than a decade, Vail town officials have filled the ranks of bus drivers with recruits from Australia. But it’s getting harder to recruit Australians, and so Vail is now planning recruitment in Puerto Rico — a place where the Aspen Skiing Co. also went looking.

Puerto Rico has the advantage of being a territory of the United States, so no H2B visas are necessary. Such visas are now in short supply.

But although Aspen Skiing got 12 employees for the winter, spokesman Jeff Hanle says it wasn’t a panacea. “It wasn’t a gold mine by any means,” he told the Vail Daily.

Some of the Puerto Ricans apparently didn’t like Aspen’s winter, and unlike employees hired under the H2B visa program, they were free just to leave.

One of the Australians who has driven buses in Vail for several years, Graeme Rowe, said Whistler and other resorts are providing more competition, and the faltering U.S. dollar has made overseas employment less attractive to Australians. As well, the mandatory interviews and other hurdles now required by the Department of Homeland Security make U.S. employment less attractive.

 

Vail, Aspen real estate flattens

ASPEN, Colo. – Real estate sales that began slowing mid-way through last year have fallen hard in several of the major resort markets.

The Aspen Times reports that the dollar volume of real-estate sales in Pitkin County plummeted 42 per cent during the first two months of this year, as compared to last year. Just $258 million passed hands.

In Vail-dominated Eagle County, the story was much the same. There, looking only at January, the Vail Daily found the lowest sales volume in four years. The newspaper, however, did not do a comparison with last year.

Real-estate agents contacted by The Aspen Times acknowledged the down-turn, but warned against making too much of it. “You have brokers saying the market is in the tank, the prices are declining,” said Mike Russo, managing partner of Aspen Land and Homes Sotheby’s International Reality. In fact, he said, the sales volume — if down significantly from last year — is still better than three of the previous five years.

“It’s not the great cause for alarm that everybody thinks,” he said.

But, if not declining in value, real estate isn’t likely to appreciate at the 20 to 30 per cent annual clip of recent years, said Chuck Frias, managing partner with Frias Properties. Like Russo, however, he sees no particular reason for alarm.

“This is very similar to past cycles, so it’s not a surprise to me,” he said. “It’s no surprise to any of us who have been in the business in Aspen for some time.”

 

Occupancy down, room rates up

SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. – Ralf Garrison delivered a report in the Summit Daily News of silver-lined dark clouds in the U.S. ski-based tourism.

Garrison’s Mountain Travel Research Program, which tracks the destination ski sector, found that from November through January occupancy rates were down 1.5 per cent. Bookings for the rest of ski season similarly suggest declines. However, the average daily room rate for early winter was up nearly 10 per cent.

Consumer confidence is lagging, oil prices are now hovering above $100 per barrel, and the dollar is at a record low, he noted. But the silver lining is that the weak dollar should attract more international visitors, and keep more U.S. residents at home.

News from Vail Resorts confirms some of these trends. Rob Katz, the chief executive officer, reported a 23 per cent increase in well-heeled international guests at the company’s five ski areas through January, which Katz said helps make up for a decline in domestic skiers. Skier visits at Vail dropped 6.2 per cent, and at Beaver Creek they were down 1.5 per cent.

Vail expects to invest up to $110 million at its five ski areas and ancillary base area hotels and other operations, Katz told reporters.

 

Aspen again says no

ASPEN, Colo. – Aspen’s city council has sent developers packing once again. Last summer, the council rejected a proposed hotel next to the ski lifts, calling it just too much. Now, a proposal to replace the city’s venerated Wienerstube restaurant with a much larger and taller building has similarly been nixed.

The new building would have been 38 feet tall in a district with buildings less than 30 feet. A neighbour, architect Charles Cunniffee, called it “10 pounds in a 5-pound bag.”

Also testifying against the bulk was a long-time resident, Steve Stevenson. “It’s not our responsibility as citizens of Aspen to make sure they make money,” he said of the developer’s plea for greater density, to make the numbers work. “If they spent too much for the building, that’s their problem and a bad business decision.”

The Aspen Times applauded the rejection. Three of the current council members were elected last summer amid an outcry from Aspenites about noise, dust, traffic, disturbance and a loss of community character — all associated with demolition and redevelopment of aging buildings.

While redevelopment is needed, the newspaper added, such redevelopment “can and should reflect not just the wishes of the developers, but also Aspen’s vision of itself.”

The rejection was a show of backbone, concluded the newspaper, and not motivated by an extremist, no-growth kind of thinking. “Rather, we think the council is pushing developers to do better and to consider their long-term impact on this town and its residents when they bring proposals forward.”

 

A suggestion for Burton

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Taos will drop its ban on snowboards effective on March 19, but Michael Pearlman, sports editor of the Jackson Hole News & Guide, doesn’t see it as a forward march of civilization.

“I don’t subscribe to stereotypes of snowboarders as disrespectful, but there’s no question that they use a mountain’s terrain differently,” he writes. “If you’ve never seen a snowboarder wipe a steep, narrow chute clean of snow, kneel underneath a blind rollover, or lay waste to a powder field that could have housed the untracked turns of a dozen skiers, then you haven’t spent much time in the mountains.”

He notes a challenge issued in December by Jake Burton, founder of Burton Snowboards, offering a $5,000 reward for the most creative video showing snowboarding on one of the (now three) remaining ski resorts that bans snowboards. Until the remaining “elitists and fascist resorts lift their Draconian ban, there should be no rest, no justice,” says the promotional video issued by Burton.

Pearlman’s response to Burton: Take those millions of dollars you’ve earned by selling snowboarding as a countercultural alternative to skiing and purchase a small resort and ban skiers.

 

Background check at issue

BEAVER CREEK, Colo. – That a ski instructor named Dave Lorenzen raped a 17-year-old girl while he was supposed to be giving her a ski lesson is not disputed. Lorenzen, now 45, had been teaching the girl for 10 years when the rape occurred in January 2006.

The girl’s mother said she paid the company $595 for a private lesson that day, then gave Lorenzen a $100 tip. He had, the instructor told the mother, worked the girl over pretty good.

What is now at issue, reports a Denver newspaper called the Rocky Mountain News, is whether Vail Associates should have informed clients of Lorenzen’s “known criminal record.” He had an arrest record dating to 1982 for offenses ranging from possession of marijuana to vehicle theft, plus a string of DUIs.

Vail Associates is the subsidiary of Vail Resorts that operates the Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas. The company, says the newspaper, claims it never promised customers that criminal checks were done on employees. Also in dispute is whether Vail Associates removed web pages that the girl’s family says had promised ski instructors with no criminal backgrounds.

Lorenzen was sentenced last summer to 90 days in jail.

 

Teachers start at nearly $39,000

EAGLE VALLEY, Colo. –Teachers in public schools in the Eagle Valley are getting pay raises. The new base pay will be $38,650, second only to Aspen, which starts teachers at $40,000.

However, teachers can earn bonuses by agreeing to teach at schools with higher poverty, reports the Vail Daily, or because of having advanced degrees and experience. A teacher with 15 years experience, for example, could earn an additional $9,663 per year, for a total of more than $48,000.

Still, despite the higher wages and a handsome benefit package, school officials think more inducement will be needed. They’re also looking at helping teachers buy homes and at district-sponsored employee housing.

 

Fathers trade punches

CANMORE, Alberta – It is well known that hockey is a very physical, occasionally violent sport. But at a recent match of two youth teams, boys ages 11 and 12, the fisticuffs was in the stands. There, one father punched another father. Canmore minor hockey officials tell the Rocky Mountain Outlook that the off-ice punch was a first.

 

Police wary of gangs

PARK CITY, Utah – If not a major problem, police in Park City and surrounding Summit County are keeping a close eye on 30 gang members living there as well as the 5,000 documented gang members in the nearby Salt Lake Valley, located about 30 miles away.

“We do not have a major problem here yet,” said Summit County Sheriff Dave Edmunds. “We are trying to prevent any type of foothold they are attempting to establish here.”

Gang members have been fingered in several robberies, but also cases of vandalism. About four-fifths of the gang members are Latinos, some of whom have been members of gangs or been influenced by gangs in California.

“The entertainment venues attract gang members,” Andrew Burton, a gang expert, told The Park Record.

 

How about another road?

TABERNASH, Colo. – The debate continues about how to best defy Colorado’s mountainous geography between Denver and the mountain resorts. This winter has brought a spate of new ideas — including some old ideas filched from the discard bin.

One of those ideas is to build a new highway directly west from Boulder across 11,775-foot Devil’s Thumb Pass and down to Tabernash, located between Winter Park and Granby. “I would be glad to pay for a small toll for an alternative to waiting on I-70,” writes Glenn Glass in a letter published in a Denver newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News.

This and other ideas for traversing Colorado’s Front Range have been around since at least the middle of the 20 th century. Instead, highway engineers bored the range with the Eisenhower and Johnson tunnels — which is probably why Summit County now is a virtual city, while Middle Park, where Granby and Winter Park are located, is sometimes called “Colorado as it used to be.”

 

Combat veteran killed in fall

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – The supreme irony was immediately evident. Eric O’Hara had survived combat for 15 months in both Afghanistan and Iraq only to suffer a violent death a month later in what is an essentially service job in the bucolic setting near the Steamboat ski area. He fell to his death six floors from the roof of the Steamboat Grand Resort Hotel while shoveling snow.

He had released a safety clip to more easily move along a rope to which he was attached for protection. A piece of ice then broke, and he slid down the sloped roof and fell over the edge.

The Steamboat Pilot & Today reports that hundreds of mourners attended a memorial service for O’Hara, including soldiers from Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the 82 nd Airborne Division in which O’Hara had served.

He led more than 80 combat missions, and was a gunner as well as a paratrooper. “The gunner is personally responsible for the safety of everyone in the vehicle and sits exposed on the top,” said Maj. Charles Claffey. “He would be right beside me through hell or high water. I am without a doubt here only because of his actions in Iraq.”

Among the survivors is a step-sister, Heidi Montag, who grew up in Crested Butte but who is a central object of an MTV reality show and who was also recently on the cover of Maxim Magazine.

 

Granby getting too upscale?

GRANBY, Colo. – While not exactly upscale by the standards of most ski-based mountain towns, Granby has some aspirations. But none of this is at all comfortable to Mike Pierce, of nearby Grand Lake. Writing in the Sky-Hi Daily News, he harrumphs about the restrictiveness of covenants adopted by homeowners associations. Parodying such restrictions, he envisions a message: “We are sorry but your car is over the maximum age of five years, and that god-awful yellow is not an approved color. Please leave.”

 

Steamboat nears snowfall record

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – With a month left in ski season, Steamboat ski area had reported 436.5 inches of snowfall for the season. Only a foot more, reports the Steamboat Pilot & Today’s Tom Ross, and Steamboat will surpass its all-time record of almost 448 inches of snow at mid-mountain, which was recorded in April 1997.

What has been remarkable about this winter, says Mike Lane, spokesman for the ski area operator, has been the consistency. There was measurable new snow on 26 days in January, and then 20 days in February. Included in those two months was a streak of 26 consecutive days of snowfall.

That falls well short of the remarkable run of 40 consecutive days of measurable snow in late 1983, but this winter’s total snowfall has nonetheless been greater.

 

Hard bodies exposed

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Fifteen years ago, a Telluride resident named Robert Presley, a costume designer, had difficulty paying for the medications to control the HIV he had contracted. In response, a fashion show was organized, with proceeds to go to the Western Colorado AIDS project, which provides services to HIV-positive people.

The fashion show has continued, and from all published evidence, the in-the-flesh thing must be a wonderful thing to view: lots of hard bodies, plenty of them scantily clad, all displayed with a certain attitude.

As one who has observed this in the flesh, The Telluride Watch publisher Seth Cagin finds the show marked by a certain defiance that would seem counterintuitive in much of the nation.

“How pointedly ironic that an AIDS benefit has a strong current over overt sexuality! Some of the fittest and most physically attractive and uninhibited of our friends and neighbors jump in front of raucous crowd and show it all off,” he writes.

“Here in Telluride, we don’t respond to a sexually transmitted plague by becoming chaste and fearful. Just the opposite: we respond with creativity, generosity and irrepressible sexuality and spirit.”

 

Wood-pellet factory to open

KREMMLING, Colo. – The chips will soon start flying in Kremmling. Located equidistant between Winter Park, Steamboat Springs, Breckenridge and Vail, Kremmling is an old sawmill town that is soon to get a plant that converts the dying and dead lodgepole pine of surrounding forests into pellets that can be burned in home stoves. The plan, reports the Middle Park Times, is expected to operate continuously, with 18 to 20 people employed. By providing a market for the dead trees, the threat of catastrophic fire to homes is expected to diminish.

 

Snowkiting catches air

DURANGO, Colo. – Although snowkiting has been around for a long time, interest is now surging in the United States, reports the Durango Telegraph. The newspaper reports a large group in Denver (which is actually based out of Colorado’s Summit County), with smaller groups in Grand Junction and, in New Mexico, at Taos. However, one of the outposts is about 95 miles south of Salt Lake City, where the town of Fairview has become a snowkiting haven.